The Fedora project has joined forces with Creative Commons. The results are a live CD with Fedora 7 and free software, along with various music, sound and image documents under the CC license.

The CDs will be distributed for the first time August 6 through 9 at Linux World in San Francisco. An ISO image of the CD is available for users to burn their own copy. The joint project has been dubbed Live Content to reflect the underlying idea of the user being able to modify the content. In fact, users are actively encouraged to use and modify the Fedora distribution and the works on the CD.

Fedora 7 has launched a new Open Source development process that supports the creation of individual distributions and appliances. It boots from the Live Content CD and uses Open Source tools such as Revisor and Pungi, which are included with the latest Fedora distribution. The CD gives users a selection of content released under the free Creative Commons licenses including audio, video, image, text and educational materials. The free software includes Open Office, Firefox, the Gimp image manipulation package, the Inkspace vector graphics tool, the Totem sound and video player, the Gthumb image viewer, and the Evince PDF viewer. The project in the form of a wiki is a subdomain of Creativecommons.org. Users can monitor the progress of development by visiting the site.

Similar projects have existed in the past: the Frama also includes a Live boot system and free software, along with tutorials, videos, music and texts released under the cc license. The project is by Framasoft.net, a French-language platform founded by private persons, and run by moderators and the community, that is totally dedicated to free software. The Free Me DVD is the work of a single person whose aim it was to collect and distribute various Creative Commons works under the motto of "free culture". The project website has various links to more Creative Commons music, photos, books and other material.

The Creative Commons project was founded in 2001 and is funded by donations from private people and companies. "Creative Commons" replaces the "All rights reserved" clause with a "Some rights reserved" variant. Under the Creative Commons License, artists can allow other people to distribute and modify their works, or to combine them with their own work (share, reuse, remix). The project provides a number of license variants for this purpose.

Until now, watching YouTube videos offline has been an awkward business, possible only with Firefox plugins or similar contraptions. Now, with the help of Creative Commons licenses, this could soon change.